Before Timothy moved west, we asked him to submit a guest article about the influence of family on his sense of style. The story he submitted prompted a follow-up visit to his old apartment in Humboldt Park, Chicago.

Timothy's Story

I spent a lot of summers at my grandmother’s house when I was a child while my mother was at work. My grandmother is an avid reader and preached the wonder of losing yourself in books. I spent those afternoons combing through her library. As a lover of luxury clothing, she had a beautiful coffee table book, a biography of Ralph Lauren. Day after day, I paged through the book, and I noticed the recurring theme of each glossy photo: Ralph never looked out of place. There were photos of him on a ranch or lounging around his home, some in a gymnasium. No matter where he was or what he was doing, his clothes and surroundings made sense together.

When I got older, my parents started caring for a teenager who became an important part of our family. He was an outsider, especially at that time. He taught me to love all types of music, but particularly late-80s punk. As I started to play music myself, I found my own scene with the punks in my hometown outside Fort Wayne, Indiana. I loved that all these kids, these “deviants,” would come together, play music in some cramped basement, and suddenly they would all make sense. It was much different than the world of Ralph Lauren, but it rang just as true. This was my small subculture. This is where I fit, and it all just clicked.

The structure that I saw in the Ralph Lauren book—as well as the punk scene where I felt at home—is something that I continue to search and strive for, in so many ways, every day. Many people spend their whole lives attempting to blend in with a place that won’t make sense for them. I’ve found that truly owning my personal style and cultivating my surroundings has been the only way to feel satisfied in the world around me. The way the smell of lavender can soothe people, I think finding yourself in a space of aesthetic cohesion can do the same.

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The Library

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Someone Else

With your library, all the books are color-coordinated. What's that all about? It's very striking.

Timothy Grindle

It gives you a feeling. It makes more sense to me than alphabetical. It's not a big enough bookshelf where I need that thing organized alphabetically. I like the way it looks with the colors. I like that it feels like a piece of art, but it's actually just a storage space.

Someone Else

Does it stress you out if you buy a new book and don't have enough space for it?

Timothy Grindle

No, because I'll just put them in other places that I like. I'm reading a comic right now that I haven't finished and I just left it on the kitchen table. It looks good there. I'll leave it there, and that's where it will stay.

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Someone Else

And of course there are the dead plants.

Timothy Grindle

Most of my plants I killed on purpose because then you don't have to take care of them and I like the way they look a lot better, like that one turned white and was obviously green originally. You've got succulents, which are kind of hard to kill and they won't turn, becuase they'll get weird and floppy, so those aren't good ones. I also like that when my father visited, he was like, "You've got to water your plants," and I was like, "Nope, that's not the point. There's a reason." I like that maybe not everyone would get it. That's part of it for me.

The Records

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Someone Else

Are the LPs there just because you want them close to the turntable?

Timothy Grindle

I like the way they look on the ground and the record player's right there so I can sift through them pretty easily. Plus when people are over, I like for them to just change the music, too. Everyone can pick their own thing. It's only about half of what I used to have. Actually, it's nice that somehow it just ends right at the door. I had to scoot the turntable over to make that (spacing) perfect.

Someone Else

What if you came across 30 LPs that were a steal?

Timothy Grindle

I would have to do some thinking. This is a perfect example: Christmas stresses me out really bad, because I'm not at home. I get things, and I have to think, "Where is that going to go?" When I get home, I want to put it all away, right away. I like putting everything in its place quickly.

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Someone Else

Speaking of Christmas, there's the tree. You mentioned before how you don't like "fashion trees."

Timothy Grindle

I hate it when it just has white lights, and all the decorations are like silver and gold. That's not personal. That (nativity scene) over there, I got it from my grandpa. We think it's Mexican. I don't know a single person in it. That's why I like it. Someone of them look like warlocks. I know baby Jesus and then some goats, the rest of them, they're up in the air. It's got personality. It's not just some ceramic, beautifully done thing that I put out every year.

With the decorations on the tree, I think there's only a handful of new ones. Most of these are from around the time when my wife and I were kids. I don't take Christmas totally serious. (Looking through an assortment of McDonald's ornaments on the tree ...) Mayor McCheese ... I don't know where you could get Mayor McCheese. I don't even think he was a prominent character.

Visual Style

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Someone Else

We've talked about the idea of settling your life visually, and how that even relates to mundane things, like your personal effects.

Timothy Grindle

When I empty out my pockets every day as I get home, I love that my wallet, key ring, pocket knife, lighter, and handerkerchif all have a similar look to them. They just look like they belong together. Seeing that random assortment of things on my windowbank just feels calming. Part of it is, I'm an anxious person and that stuff helps me. I feel much better and more comfortable if I look around and everything is where it should be, or where I'd want it, and then has some kind of meaning attached to it, or there's a reason it's the way it is.

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Someone Else

Does everything here have a reason behind it?

Timothy Grindle

As much as humanly possible. It drives me nuts that the sponges I use are stupid sponges. I wish I could get something cooler. I've been looking. I just want to like and know a lot about everything that's in here. The couch is stupid. It's Ikea. It's what I could afford when I first got married, abut I sort of like that, and it's getting really ruined by the cat clawing at it, which I should have put a stop to, but I sort of like how it looks.

I like this chair becuase it's beat up and I've never tried to fix it. I'm just going to let it get destroyed over time. Plus this chair, this was actually on the set of CBS News in Chicago for like 40 years. I've seen the pictures. When they'd go over world news, this was the guest chair. The guy who had it before me got it at an auction.

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Someone Else

If you were in a house that just had a bunch of stuff in it, would that overwhelm you?

Timothy Grindle

Yeah. When you go to some houses, they're nice and put together, but it just feels like someone bought a bunch of stuff to put it in a place becuase that's what goes in those places. It just kind of drives me nuts. I don't feel like anybody cares about anything that's in there, and it feels really empty. I've been to a lot of rich people's houses and I feel like a lot of times they've hired a decorator or maybe they've just seen it in a magazine and pretty much copied that look. It feels really cavey.

Someone Else

When we first got here, you mentioned something about the show “Frasier” …

Timothy Grindle

I love “Frasier.” It might have been the first episode, when his dad comes to live with him and he doesn't understand why nothing matches in the house. Frasier tells him that it’s eclecticism, that it's not supposed to match. If everything is beautiful on its own and you put it around other things, it will go together. That has always stuck in my head.

I try to make everything in here have some kind of cohesion, but for the most part it doesn't match. I don't want it to match. I just like everything for different reasons. If you do everything that way, it all sort of goes together. Its not like there is a color scheme necessarily in here. The more I look around, the more I find other things. Those rocks back there we bought from a mystic lady …

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Wardrobe

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Someone Else

How does this sense of style, or aesthetics, relate back to your clothing? You’ve talked about eclecticism, so what does it mean for your blazer to go with that shirt, and that shirt with those jeans?

Timothy Grindle

It’s not just about color and fit because those are the most obvious ones. It’s more about, “Does that match my general aesthetic, the way I wear my clothes?” There's something more than color and fit. When would I wear it in a day? Does it have the pockets I would want it to have? I like breast pockets because I usually keep stuff in it, my pens at work. It's a little bit more utilitarian than just color. It’s hard to put into words because it’s a thing in my head that I understand. I think that's the word “aesthetic” in general―that word means something different to every single person who’s going to think about it.

If you gave me an option of 10 different things and I could pick out two that I think look best together, most people would pick different things. If there were different colors, maybe two people would pick out the two blue things because those would go together, and somebody would pick orange and red because it makes them think of this or that.

I start the backwards way. I already know what I think looks good. It’s more like, give me two, any two―I’ll make them work.